Nearly everything you assume about colonialism and slavery is wrong

Nigel Biggar’s book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning(2021) is a much needed corrective to the lies and misinformation being propagated in schools all over the world. For instance, after nearly 150 years of transporting slaves across the Atlantic Ocean, the British abolished the slave trade and spent the subsequent 150 years deploying the Royal Navy to stop the slave trade across the world. Not only was this the first time a major superpower abolished the ancient practice of slavery, but it was also the first instance of an empire suppressing it beyond its borders.

Up to 36 ships from the Royal Navy, over 13 per cent of the Empire’s total manpower, were stationed off the Coast of Africa, policing the Atlantic Ocean until the late 1800s. Britain was able to pressure countries like Brazil into passing legislation which outlawed the slave trade. Before his death in 1865, the twice-Prime Minister Lord Palmerston wrote that ‘the achievement which I look back on with the greatest and purest pleasure was forcing the Brazilians to give up their slave trade’. Ultimately, 2,000 British Sailors gave their life to stop the international slave trade.

But what most people have never been taught though, is that the anti-slavery movement actually began much earlier than 1833. In fact, in 1791, about 30 per cent of the adult male population of Britain signed anti-slavery petitions. Few people realise today that the largest department of the British Empire’s Foreign Office for two decades was the Slave Trade Department, which was set up to suppress slavery worldwide.

It is also a little-known fact today, that according to the historian David Eltis, it cost the British Empire more money to end the slave trade than it received in profits from it. It cost taxpayers nearly 2 billion pounds every year for half a century. For context, the British today spends 2 per cent of their GDP on national defence. In comparison, the British Empire nearly 2 per cent of its GDP every year for 50 years to end the slave trade. In fact, the British taxpayer only finished paying off the debt of ending slavery in 2015.

However, despite these astonishing facts about the British Empire, recent You Gov polling found that 60 per cent of Britons who were proud of the British Empire in 2014, had drastically halved to almost 30 per cent by 2020. Other polling has also shown that only one in five young people view Winston Churchill favourably.

Today, colonialism is routinely called essentially evil, genocidal, greedy, and racist. These attitudes have generated a wave of riots tearing down statues and rejecting anything that has been a product of European colonialism.

So how did attitudes about the British Empire change so quickly? Is the legacy of the British Empire good or bad? Was it built on slavery or cooperation? Did it expand through violence or trade? And was the British Empire essentially racist?

These are the questions at the heart of Cambridge academic Nigel Biggar’s new book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, and what follows is some his most important ideas which very people have been taught today.

Chapter 1: The Origins of the British Empire

Before asking whether the British Empire was evil, we first need to consider how a small European island at its peak controlled nearly a quarter of the world’s land mass.

So why did England choose to expand? Well, like many complex ideas, there was no single motivation that drove the British Empire. For example, the British Empire began expanding when the Kingdom of Wessex sought to secure its borders in response to Danish and Welsh invasions. Even the conquest of the North America was driven by the threat of Catholic Spain, which was committed to overthrowing protestant Europe.

Additionally, British privateers established colonial ports at key strategic locations in Africa and America in response to Spanish competition. For many young British officers of the East Indian trading company, they were driven by the intention to trade and the excitement of adventure, like John Malcolm, who joined the EIC because his father had gone bankrupt. Malcolm ended up learning and documenting the Persian language and history, eventually became the governor of Bombay. The governor, like many others in the British Empire, was motivated to escape poverty and earn a living.

In fact, British colonialism began and was supported by mutual cooperation with the local population. For example, the EIC secured trading ports in India, and after hiring and training Indian troops, developed small colonies. Many Indian rulers actually paid the British military to protect their kingdoms against other native rulers, who began giving land to the British as payment. As Tirthankar Roy, one of the leading Indian historians of the 21st Century states:

Turning the emergence of the empire into a battle between good and evil creates melodrama; it invites the reader to take sides in a fake holy war. But if good soap opera, it is bad history. The empire was not an invasion. Many Indians, because they did not trust other Indians, wanted the British to secure power. They preferred British rule over indigenous alternatives and helped the Company form a state. The empire emerged mainly from alliances. It emerged from lands ‘ceded’ to the Company by Indian friends, rather than lands it ‘conquered’. The Company came to rule India because many Indians wanted it to.

Interestingly, it was the British who were keener in documenting the culture and languages of Persian, Hindu, and Bengali people, than the locals. For example, the EIC officer Warren Hastings pioneered the revival of Indian Sanskrit.

Money and knowledge were not the only motivation for colonies, it was also agreed by officers like John Malcolm and James Abbott, that to leave India would be dangerous because it would cause a power struggle between warring states. So, if the British Empire expanded through cooperation with local Indian rulers, what about Africa? Again, the British were motivated not just by one goal, but many.

First, Britain wanted to stop the spread of Militant Islam to protect trade with Uganda and Nyasaland.

Second, Britain wanted to end inter-tribal warfare between kingdoms like the Zulu and Ndebele, which was a cause of human misery, slave trafficking, and trade disruptions.

Third, as Lord Salisbury argued in the 1890 Anglo-German Agreement Bill, acquisition of land would stop the escalation of European nations going to war over local conflicts.

Fourth, in places like Egypt, Britain were duty bound to protect their investments in the Egyptian government which was on the verge of bankruptcy. London’s aims in Cairo were not to directly govern, but to enact fiscal reform to the benefit of both countries which was the view of the British comptroller general in Egypt, Lord Cromer. In fact, the colonial office did not want to directly govern Egypt because of the financial responsibility and burden of administration, the exact reason it declined the offer of exclusive control over Gladstone by the Ottoman Sultan.

Fifth, as early as Sir Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras from 1819-27, Britain saw its role in many of its colonies as the precursor to self-government. This reality was made pertinent after the American war of Independence, which saw Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa granted the status of self-governing dominions.

As Biggar points out, there was no single ‘set of motives that drove the British Empire’. It was a collection of reasons which differed between ‘trader, migrant, soldier, missionary, entrepreneur, financier, government official, and statesmen’. These ranged from:

‘The aversion to poverty and persecution, the yearning for a better life, the desire to make one’s way in the world, the duty to satisfy shareholders, the lure of adventure, cultural curiosity, the need to make peace and keep it, the concomitant need to maintain martial prestige, the imperative of gaining military or political advantage over enemies and rivals, and the vocation to lift oppression and establish stable self-government.’

But what about slavery? Wasn’t the British motivated by the benefits of buying, working, and selling slaves?

Chapter 2: The British Empire and Slavery

Before we unpack colonial slavery, we first have to understand its history. Slavery was not unique to the British Empire; rather it is both ancient and universal.

In Asia, for instance, slavery could be found as early as 7th Century AD in China. In North and South America, the Comanche, Aztecs, and Incas all ‘ran a slave economy from the 18th Century. Since Muhammad, the Islamic world has utilised slavery, even receiving white European slaves from Viking traders in the 8th and 9th Centuries.

It is a little-known fact today, but the word slave actually comes from the European group of people ‘Slav’. One historian estimates over 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved in the North African trade before the end of the 18th Century. By comparison, it is estimated that while Europeans transported 11 million slaves from Africa, another 17 million were shipped by the Islamic slave trade. Similarly, African tribes have been enslaving each other for centuries. Many of these slaves was used as human sacrifices. Biggar quotes one report from 1797 which recorded between 1400-1500 people being sacrificed at a royal funeral in Asante Africa.

The British were not even the first or largest slave trader in Africa. The Portuguese Empire was the first European nation to seek slaves from West Africa from 1440. By 1866, the Portuguese had almost shipped 5.9 million slaves, which is 46.7 per cent of the total African slave trade by Europeans, compared to the 26.1 per cent of the British.

So why does the criticism for slavery often rest on Britain, if it was part such an ancient and universal practice? One of the critics to popularise British Slavery in particular was the historian Eric Williams, in his seminal work Capitalism and Slavery (1944), where he argued slavery made ‘an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development’.

Unfortunately for Williams, his thesis has since been widely discredited by academics familiar with British Economic history. In the 1960s, Roger Anstey calculated the profits of slavery to be far below the revenue needed to finance the Industrial Revolution. This view was confirmed by David Robertson Richardson who estimated the total profits of the slave trade to be around 1 per cent of Britain’s total domestic investment around 1790. More recently, David Brion Davis, an expert in 20th Century slavery pronounced the death of William’s thesis, declaring that it ‘has now been wholly discredited by other scholars’.

Chapter 3: An Empire of Stolen Land?

What about countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, where native tribes did not always negotiate formal treaties with the British government?

In 1768, Captain Cook was instructed that he was to ‘endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a friendship and alliance with [the native peoples]’ and ‘with [their] consent to take possession of convenient situations in the country in the name of the King of Great Britain’.

So why didn’t the British build an alliance like it did with local groups in India?

First, most of the local tribal groups had shifting borders due to conflict and migration. The Canadian historian Tom Flanagan argues, it is hard to do justice:

‘…to the war of extermination waged by the Iroquois against the Huron, or to the ferocious struggles between the Cree and the Blackfoot over access to the buffalo herds. The historical record clearly shows that, while aboriginal peoples exercised a kind of collective control over territories, the boundaries were neither long-lasting nor well defined and communities must have been repeatedly formed, dissolved, and reconstituted with different identities.’

In America, the Comanches launched ‘an explosive expansion’, which obliterated ‘the Apache civilisation from the Great Plains’ and carved out ‘a vast territory’. From 1750 to 1850 their empire dominated the region, building ‘the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest’.

In Australia, the historian Geoffrey Blainey points out the rate of violent deaths in some areas between Aboriginal tribal groups was greater than the rate of violent deaths in almost every European country during the second world war. There are several documented accounts of early Aboriginal tribes wiping out other tribes in what is now known as northern Victoria.

In New Zealand, Polynesian explorers began what has been called ‘the Maori colonial era’, which by the 15th Century gave rise to inter-tribal warfare, enslavement, generational vendettas, and sometimes cannibalism. As Biggar points out, ‘The bloodshed ended thanks in part to the influence of Christianity, which forbade cannibalism and slavery, and whose influence was spread by Maori evangelists, many of them former slaves.’ According to a leading New Zealand historian:

‘By 1850 the balance sheet of benefits and disadvantages of British administration might well have appeared favourable to many Maori. There appeared to be a place for Maori people in a variety of colonial activities. They profited from the increased pace of development as settlement expanded. Through government employment on road and other public works, as well as through private contracts, Maori earned considerable amounts in cash. The new authority in the land also gradually overcame some of the old tribal antagonisms and made it possible for tribes to mix and communicate more freely. Under [Governor George] Grey’s administration, some of the long-promised welfare benefits were provided: hospitals were opened and the Education Ordinance provided for Maori education.’

Nevertheless, there were many instances of hostile conflict between natives and settlers, which were often one-sided, brutal and devastating for the local populations. Unfortunately, most of it happened outside of government control, which could not stop the individual expansion of enterprise. As Biggar writes:

‘Sometimes native peoples lost territory to colonists because the latter mistook land that was unoccupied or uncultivated for land that was unowned. Sometimes the natives lost it because they were conquered by ungoverned settlers in war that easily flared up on lawless frontiers, where fear was abundant and trust rare. However, where British imperial authorities succeeded in asserting their ‘sovereignty’ over territory, native title to land was recognised and its transfer to settlers regulated – in principle and sometimes in practice – for the sake of justice and of peace.’

Chapter 4: Conclusion

So why are these reasonable and balanced accounts of the British Empire covered up and rarely discussed? As Biggar points out, ‘The controversy over empire is not really a controversy about history at all. It is about the present, not the past.’

Some of the most important debates in Australia today, in changing the Constitution to have an enshrined Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal people, and the international push for reparations, are justified by a one-sided view of colonial history.

The anger towards the British Empire is so strong that Biggar’s book was pulled by Bloomsbury publishing right before its release because ‘public feeling’ was ‘not currently favourable’. The book had already gone through rigorous peer review from some of the world’s most prominent academics on the subject. Biggar’s book was not cancelled by its publishers for a lack of research, but rather a fear of backlash from anti-colonial activists.

Today, academic papers like From Colonisation to the Holocaust, The Erotics of Resistance, and Colonisations impact on climate change and the queer community pass as serious research. The truth is, all of the most prosperous nations in the world are heirs of the British Empire, its institutions, laws, customs, and language.

If anyone wants to understand where we are today, and where are going, we must have a better and more balanced understanding of our history, which includes the good, the bad, and everything in between.

Without a proper appreciation for history, we may never improve on the prosperity and peace laid down by the foundations of the British Empire.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/nearly-everything-you-assume-about-colonialism-and-slavery-is-wrong/

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)

https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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Have I "radicalised"?

Matt Goodwin describes well below the way a half-mad Leftist elite have taken control of the national discourse in Britain -- to a point where policies and procedures very harmful to the average Briton have been put in place.

A major omisssion from what Matt says below, however, is that he fails to take account of the fact that it is only one half of the elite that is Leftist. At election time, at least half of people in elite occupations vote conservative. As ever, it is minorities and the poor who are the support-base of the Left, not the elite as a whole.

So the deeper question about elite influence is how the LEFTIST elite have gained so much power in the media, in the educational system and to some extent in big business?

An answer is complacency. The destructive Leftist policies all have justifications as being kind and caring. And those who are in a position to see the full picture tend to think that the polices sound good so may well spring from real good intentions and should therefore not be opposed. So we badly need writers such as Matt to alert us to how much damage is being done by the ideas of the Leftist elite

“What happened to you, Matt? When did you change your views? When did you become right-wing? When did you become … radical?”

These are questions I’m asked a lot, usually by disgruntled members of the elite class —an assortment of left-wing academics, journalists, and think-tankers I worked with more than a decade ago.

And while this is deliberate, a concerted strategy to try and discredit anybody who challenges the elite consensus, these questions do need answering for two reasons.

First, because I feel an enormous sense of responsibility and obligation to be as truthful as possible to you, my readers and supporters.

And, second, because as one of my favourite writers, Andrew Sullivan, once wrote, this dynamic should really be the other way round.

It’s not me who has radicalised. It’s the elite class.

Today, we are simply living through the greatest radicalisation of the ruling class in Western democracies since at least the 1960s, if not for more than a century.

What do I mean by this?

Well, let’s start with my own views.

I’ve certainly made no secret of the fact that, over the last fifteen years or so, I’ve become more critical of things like mass, uncontrolled immigration.

Why? Because research shows it creates low-trust societies that are more divided, polarised, segregated, less supportive of welfare, and more violent.

I was recently in Sweden, for example, where I did not meet anybody on the left or right who felt their country’s experiment with mass immigration has been a success.

Let me say that again.

I was in Sweden —notoriously liberal, tolerant Sweden— and I could not find a single soul who thought that mass immigration had made their country a nice place to live.

I’ve also become more critical not of multi-ethnic societies per se but rather the state policy of multiculturalism, which encourages different ethnic and religious groups to live separate ‘parallel lives’, rather than integrate into a wider, shared community.

And I’m not alone in this.

More than a decade ago, leaders from across the spectrum —David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Tony Blair— could all say much the same, and in public.

What else do I think?

I reject anti-Muslim prejudice much like I reject anti-Semitism and racism.

But I do have strong and growing concerns about the capacity and willingness of Islam to integrate into West nations, to respect our rule of law, the rights of women and same-sex couples, and to root out violent Islamism among its ranks.

My critics on the left, who have spent much of the last decade inflating terms like “Islamophobia”, will say this is irrational.

But I would say it’s entirely rational after watching violent Islamists blow up 52 of their fellow citizens on London’s Tube and buses, murder British children at a pop concert, execute British soldier Lee Rigby, police officer Keith Palmer, and Member of Parliament Sir David Amess, attempt to blow up a women’s hospital in Liverpool, and stab and murder dozens of other innocents, like pensioner Terence Carney.

Not to mention my confusion about why so few prominent British Muslims, Imams, and others, for years, failed to call out the industrial-scale rape of young white girls at the hands of Pakistani Muslim gangs in dozens of English cities, and when a few brave souls did call this out much of the left said nothing or dismissed them as ‘racist’.

I also believe passionately in free speech but now worry it’s being undermined by a creeping groupthink, political correctness, and cancel culture —a point The Economist, among many others, has also made in recent years.

I think we’re too soft on criminals and would like to see tougher sentencing, especially for repeat offenders who make the lives of their fellow residents and communities miserable and intolerable because we no longer put them where they belong: prison.

I believe that the family, shaped by my own experience of having been raised by divorced parents, is the most important unit in society, that children who are raised by two parents routinely do better in life than those who are not.

I believe that the nation-state is an incredibly powerful source of belonging, pride, and status for most people, that Western nations got more things right than wrong in their history, and that public institutions, especially schools and universities, should ensure this remarkable cultural inheritance is passed down to our children.

And when it comes to economics, I think capitalism is the most successful economic system we’ve managed to create but also think that global corporations, big business and crony capitalists routinely look for ways to exploit workers.

Like many other members of my generation, Gen-X, I came of age during the 1990s and the 2000s, watching globalisation disproportionately damage the working-class in Western economies and then lived through the Global Financial Crash, with few of those responsible for ruining economies and people’s lives facing any consequences.

These views are not extreme. Nor are they particularly radical.

They basically put me where the average voter is. Across the West, all these views are shared by millions, and usually majorities, of ordinary people.

But now look at the elite class.

Look at the university graduates from the elite institutions, who work in financially secure if not well-paid professional jobs, who live in one of the big cities, the affluent commuter suburbs, and the university towns, whose parents also belong to this class, whose marriages and social networks are likewise filled with people from this class, who share the same backgrounds, values, and political loyalties, and who all lean strongly to the political and cultural left.

They’ve radicalised.

Over the last fifteen years, they’ve swung even more sharply to the left, leaving a large number of people scratching their heads, asking themselves the same question.

What the hell happened to the ruling class, to the people who dominate the most important and influential institutions in my country, who claim to speak on my behalf?

Writing on his deathbed in the early 1990s, the academic Christopher Lasch once said that the revolt that was about to commence in the West would not see the masses revolting against elites but elites revolting against the masses.

And he was right; this is exactly what is now happening around us.

Increasingly, our societies are being radically reshaped around the values, beliefs, tastes, and priorities of a radicalising minority elite, rather than the wider majority.

Just look at where the elite class is today compared to where it was, say, ten or fifteen years ago, and compared to where many ordinary people, like me, still are today.

While large majorities of people in the West, like me, think mass, uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable and damaging Western economies, culture, and ways of life, today’s elite class, as we saw in its reaction to things like Europe’s refugee crisis, Brexit, Trump, and the recent immigration protests in the UK, has now radicalised to such an extent that it views any criticism of this policy, any criticism at all, as tantamount to ‘racism’ and ‘hate’.

Whereas only a few years ago, the likes of Cameron, Merkel, Sarkozy, and Blair could talk openly about the failure of state multiculturalism, triggering a useful debate, today’s elite class, including even Conservatives, could not even handle the likes of Suella Braverman making the very same point without having a complete nervous breakdown and catastrophising about the possible return of fascism.

Similarly, whereas in the aftermath of the terrorist atrocities on 9/11 and 7/7 we could just about have a reasonable debate about how best to integrate newcomers, prevent Islamist terror, and encourage ‘community cohesion’, however flawed those ideas were, today, after things like the murder of children at an Ariana Grande pop concert and the murder of Sir David Amess, the elite class has a total meltdown and insists that we either hold hands and sing ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ or have a completely irrelevant debate about ‘online safety’ and how to ‘be nice’ on social media.

Compare and contrast, too, the reaction to urban disturbances in England’s northern towns, in 2001, with the reaction to the immigration protests this year. Whereas only twenty years ago, the elite class was capable of talking openly about the underlying cause, the fact minority (mainly Muslim) communities were living ‘parallel lives’, and that our model of multiculturalism was very clearly failing, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it is incapable to talking about the cause at all.

So far, weeks on from the rioting and protests, for example, the elite class has still said nothing at all about the root cause of the immigration protests, preferring instead to view them simply and narrowly through the prism of criminality while deriding much of the rest of the country as ‘far-right thugs’ and desperately searching for new ways to curtail free speech and shut down any debate. Today’s elite class, in other words, has radicalised to such an extent it is now completely incapable of even leading a national debate that might give voice to views which challenge the elite consensus.

While many people in the West, meanwhile, like me, used to think that a level of net migration of 150,000 a year was too high —a view, by the way, shared by much of the elite class as recently as fifteen years ago— today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that whether on the right or left it now has no problem at all with pushing this number to an eye-watering 700,000 a year while continuously breaking manifesto promises to lower the overall number. The elite class, in short, has morphed from accepting it made mistakes on this issue to now just lying to the British people.

In the 2000s, New Labour politicians could talk openly and honestly about the urgent need to regain control of the borders and swiftly remove illegal migrants from the country; but today, in sharp contrast, the elite class is falling over itself to grant amnesty to nearly 100,000 illegal migrants while branding anybody who talks about ‘stopping the boats’ as ‘far-right’ and blaming them for the outbreak of rioting.

I mean, seriously, am I supposed to be the person who has radicalised here?

While many people in the West, like me, think free speech should be protected and promoted, today’s elite class, as we see through the spread of a chilling cancel culture, an oppressive political correctness, and online mobbings of anybody who dissents on social media, is routinely willing to sacrifice free speech on the altar of ‘social justice’ and protecting minorities from what it calls ‘emotional harm’. Routinely, major surveys now find that the left-leaning elites who dominate universities and other public institutions are the most willing of all to say they’d compromise on free speech and free expression if it means greater protection for minority groups, which helps to explain why they are so eager to shut down voices like mine.

While many people in the West, like me, still think Western liberal societies should be organised around individual rights, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that it actively subordinates individual rights behind people’s fixed group identities. The only thing that really matters to today’s elite class, which is now falling over itself to impose ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ policies on pretty much every institution and government department, is not our individual achievements and character but merely what fixed identity group we belong to. Do we belong to one of the morally superior ‘oppressed’ racial, sexual, or gender minority groups? Or do we belong to the morally inferior ‘oppressor’ majority group, which should be treated with suspicion, if not contempt? Everything, increasingly, flows from these questions.

Even worse, while many people, like me, believe that a child’s early years should be about joy, play, and a politically neutral education, today’s elite class now appears absolutely determined to sexualise and racialise our children, exposing them to radical ideologies that have no serious basis in science and then complaining about the rise of ‘culture wars’ when mums and dads ask entirely legitimate questions about why their child is being taught there are 72 genders, divided into separate ‘racial affinity’ groups in class, or to hate their country, its history, and culture.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of debating in good faith and ensuring there is a diverse range of opinions in the institutions and national debate, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent it can no longer tolerate any dissent at all, which again you see in the authoritarian reaction to people like me. Consistently, the elite class has launched an assault on contrarian thinkers, demanded that alternative television channels like GB News, and social media platforms like Twitter/X be shut down, failed to stop unorthodox gender critical and conservative scholars from being kicked out of universities, and is now increasingly using ‘hate laws’, ‘non-hate crime incidents’ and opposition to ‘legal but harmful’ views to essentially shut down alternative perspectives it does not like.

What happened to me, you ask? No. What the hell happened to you.

Support Matt's Work

While many people in the West, like me, think we should treat people from different racial, ethnic, and religious groups equally before the law, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that, as we’ve seen in its reaction to the immigration protests, the marches after the hideous attacks on Israel on October 7th attack, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the ongoing failure to address ‘Muslim grooming gangs’, it’s now more than happy to treat minorities more favourably than the majority, or simply remain silent when some people from minority backgrounds flagrantly violate our children, laws, and ways of life.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the superiority of Western civilisation and Enlightenment values, and on balance think the West got more right than wrong in its history, today’s elite class, which is supposed to value nuance, evidence, and reason, has now become utterly obsessed with feeding its own sense of moral righteousness and narcissism by trying to convince us that everything from our history to science, from cricket to the countryside, are mere manifestations of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘structural racism’. Increasingly, they hate who we are to try and win more social status, esteem, and prestige for themselves, from other elites.

While many people in the West, like me, still believe in the critical importance of a politically independent and ideologically diverse media that prioritises truth, today’s elite class has radicalised to such an extent that once respected legacy media like the BBC, the New York Times, and Financial Times, have morphed into platforms for hyper-political activists who prioritise ideological dogma over truth and reason.

And in the universities, too, I spent much of the last decade watching things like the Grievance Studies Affair and the shocking harassment and sacking of scholars who challenge the consensus, like Kathleen Stock and Roland Fryer, all of which made it obvious that the academy is now openly corrupt, highly politicised, and much more interested in prioritising left-wing dogma over evidence and reason —shocking cases, by the way, about which my critics said … absolutely nothing at all.

While many people in the West, like me, think we should be led by the kind of evidence and logic that underpinned the UK’s Cass Review into what was happening to children in hospitals, which pointed out there was insufficient evidence to be pushing children onto things like ‘puberty blockers’, the elite class today has become so radical that it’s no longer interested in evidence that challenges its worldview at all. Routinely, as we still see in healthcare and education, the so-called ‘expert class’ still put emotional blackmail, superstition, and dogma before empirical evidence, even when it involves the medical treatment (read: mutilation) of our children.

While many people in the West, like me, certainly think voters can be misled but ultimately see them as rational beings capable of making up their own minds, today’s elite class now trace any political outcome it doesn’t like, whether at elections or referendums, to “misinformation”, all while trying to tell us with a straight face that boys can become girls and girls can become boys, or that things like Brexit and Trump were caused by Russia. Who is spreading “misinformation” here?

And while many people in the West, like me, think that people voting for things we don’t like is a bit annoying but perfectly acceptable in a democracy, today’s elite class, as we’ve seen in its reaction to things like Brexit, Trump, Boris Johnson, and fourteen years of pro-immigration liberal Tory government, has radicalised to such a degree that it now genuinely appears to believe it is living amid a fascist uprising, that the West is on the cusp of morphing into something that resembles the Third Reich.

In some other galaxy, where the elite class is just a fringe group of oddball people who have no influence over society, these views might not matter. But because the elite class dominate the most important and influential institutions, it’s used its immense social and cultural power to impose this narrow, illiberal and radical worldview on the rest of us —on ‘meaning making’ institutions like schools, universities, government departments, healthcare systems, legacy media, and creative and cultural industries.

This is deeply problematic because while the elite class likes to think of itself as representing the beating heart of the nation, the blunt reality, as major surveys show, is that most of its views are only held by a maximum of 10-15% of people in the West.

This is why, today, a much larger number of people are looking at the radicalisation of the elite class with a combination of bemusement, shock, and, increasingly, horror, wondering what the hell happened to the people who are ruling over them, claiming to speak on their behalf.

While my critics certainly don’t like it, the blunt reality is that many of these ordinary people are much closer to my views than the radicalising views of the elite class, and yet writers like me who challenge if not oppose the elite consensus are now framed as radical outliers. But as Andrew Sullivan said, this is the wrong way round. It is the elite class that is now the radical outlier.

The real story here, the story my critics routinely ignore or get wrong, is actually not about me at all. It is about the radicalisation of the elite class, a minority radical elite that is imposing its values on the rest of society while simultaneously expecting ordinary people not to notice and certainly not dare say anything about it.

Mass uncontrolled immigration. Broken borders. Segregation. The rise of violent Islamism. A stifling political correctness. Woke ideology. The dismissal of biology, empirical evidence, and scientific fact. The closing down of free speech and the public square. The repudiation of our history, culture, and ways of life. And the general hatred and class prejudice that’s now hurled at millions of ordinary people when they happen to vote for, or say, the wrong thing.

When did I radicalise, you say?

You must be joking. When the hell did YOU radicalise.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/have-i-radicalised

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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The Deceived vs. the Indoctrinated

The American public has been subjected to massive propaganda efforts by both our government and our media for years. It’s important to understand the impact this has on the current presidential campaign.

That starts with understanding the difference between deception and indoctrination.

Those who have been merely deceived may be surprised when the deception is exposed. They may even be angry. But they will change their positions when confronted with facts that contradict them.

The indoctrinated will not.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “indoctrinated” as “accepting a set of beliefs without question, refusing to consider any others.” For the indoctrinated, those beliefs become part of their identity; they will not let go of them, even when faced with contrary evidence or explicit falsehoods.

Millions of Americans have been propagandized to believe that former President Donald Trump is “literally Hitler” and “a threat to our democracy”; that he will “destroy this country” or “start World War III.” You can provide all the proof to the contrary you want; it will not change their minds.

I’ve had conversations with friends and loved ones who profess to be terrified about the possible perils of another Trump presidency. In those, I point out just some of the actual conduct of the Biden administration:

— Imprisoning Americans and depriving them of their constitutional rights to due process

— Collaborating with Big Tech companies to censor truthful information about the 2020 elections, the origins of COVID-19, the United States’ role in funding gain-of-function research at the international virology laboratory in Wuhan, China, the efficacy of drugs like ivermectin in treating COVID-19, and the illness and deaths caused by the mRNA vaccines that were forced upon Americans

— Fabricating allegations of Trump’s “collusion” with Russia in the 2016 election, lying to a federal court to obtain illegal surveillance warrants and spending upwards of $35 million to “investigate” allegations they already knew were false

— Calling sexually explicit and criminal content on Hunter Biden’s laptop “Russian disinformation,” and keeping it from the American public when they knew it was truthful, in order to impact the 2020 presidential election

— Prosecuting Trump for possession of allegedly classified documents but refusing to prosecute President Joe Biden for the same conduct

— Weaponizing the legal system against the administration’s political opponents

— Actively preventing the enactment and enforcement of laws that protect election integrity (for example, requiring identification and proof of citizenship before voting)

— Botching the withdrawal from Afghanistan and leaving thousands of American citizens and Afghani allies behind, as well as billions of dollars in military material and ammunition left for the Taliban

— Two major wars and $175 billion in taxpayer dollars given to Ukraine;

— Allowing approximately 10 million migrants to cross the border illegally in the past three and a half years, flying and busing them all over the country, housing them and given them monthly stipends, all at taxpayer expense

— Choking off our own energy production, sending the costs of fuel — and thus, everything else — skyrocketing, and creating the worst inflation we’ve had in more than 40 years

What reaction do I get? Blink … blink … “But Donald Trump …”

That’s indoctrination.

I’ve heard other attempted explanations. “Well,” the argument goes, “maybe people don’t care because these events primarily affect those with whom they disagree politically.”

But if that were true, they would be irate when confronted with the negative impact on populations they do purport to care about. For example, the illegal importation of millions of migrants has diverted resources away from America’s poor, our homeless, veterans and those dealing with substance abuse and mental illness. The presence of millions of illegal immigrants also inflates housing costs and depresses the job prospects for America’s working poor, including Blacks and single parents. And inflation affects everyone.

It doesn’t matter.

More compelling proof can be found in Democrat voters’ reactions to the events of the past three weeks that uniquely affected them:

First, Biden’s disastrous performance at the first presidential debate on June 27 exposed the ugly reality that their own party and the press had been lying about the president’s declining mental faculties for years. Had Democrat voters known about Biden’s condition in 2020, they could have chosen a different candidate.

It doesn’t matter.

Second, despite Biden’s adamant insistence that he was staying in the race, the Democratic Party forced him out in a de facto palace coup, had him issue a bland statement on X/Twitter and kept him in seclusion for almost a week.

It doesn’t matter.

Third, they just unilaterally substituted a new presidential candidate — Vice President Kamala Harris — without any participation by the party’s voters at all.

And by the way, this is the third time the Democratic Party has played fast and loose with internal electoral processes to install a candidate over the wishes of their voters, who wanted Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 and favored a different vice presidential running mate in 2020.

With few notable exceptions (Black Lives Matter and some donors), none of this seems to matter to Democrat voters.

Harris is already out on the stump, and we’re being treated to glowing press coverage featuring cheering crowds, and puff pieces promoting the many “firsts” associated with her impending victory: the first woman president, the first Indian American president, the first Jamaican American president, the first African American president. (OK, Jamaica is not in Africa, but that doesn’t matter, either.)

Republicans need to understand that they are dealing with a population in which a substantial number are completely unreachable, even by the most unassailable arguments. To reach the rest, the focus of Trump’s campaign must be not on irrelevancies like Harris’ former love life or her lack of children, but on her lack of qualifications, her incompetence and the disastrous policies she favors.

The proof of that — at least for those who aren’t indoctrinated — is ample.

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/108801-the-deceived-vs-the-indoctrinated-2024-07-25

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Trump Calls Tech Support

This weekend, a former Manhattan real estate developer and one-time crypto critic will be in Nashville to speak at Bitcoin 2024, the world’s largest bitcoin conference.

As Forbes reports, “Trump will give a 30-minute keynote address Saturday during the conference’s final day, in a speech that will likely attempt to court voters and capitalize on support he has already received from key cryptocurrency figures like the Winklevoss twins” of early Facebook fame.

Times have certainly changed.

Indeed, it would’ve been hard to imagine, just 10 years ago, that a 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee would be beating the hip, cool, trendy party of Barack Obama at its own technology game. But here we are.

“A sea change is underway in the tech industry,” write Robert Bellafiore and Jon Askonas at City Journal. “It is increasingly not just permitted, but downright fashionable, for technologists to reside on the political right. Moments after the Trump assassination attempt, Elon Musk ‘fully endorse[d]’ the former president. In the following days, venture capitalist and PayPal alumnus David Sacks spoke at the Republican National Convention, leading venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz announced their support for Trump, and Trump tapped former venture capitalist J.D. Vance as his running mate. A new Trump super PAC enjoys the backing of Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, the Winklevoss twins … and Musk himself.”

We might also consider a recent comment from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, he of the infamous infusion of nearly half a billion Zuckerbucks into the 2020 election to help get out the vote in the Democrat-controlled urban areas of the narrowly decided swing states. Perhaps, having seen the error in his ways; and perhaps, having seen the electoral writing on the wall; and perhaps, wanting to hedge his bets should a Republican-controlled Congress in 2025 seek to do away with the Section 230 protections that allow social media sites like Facebook to censor conservative speech while enjoying the legal protections of platforms as opposed to publishers — perhaps, given all these factors, Zuck thought it might be wise to send a shoutout to the assassination-dodging, fist-pumping former and perhaps future president.

“Seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” said an admiring Zuckerberg recently, adding, “On some level as an American, it’s like hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight, and I think that that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”

According to Trump’s brief Bitcoin 2024 speaker bio, he “announced his support for the American Bitcoin industry in May 2024, advocating for financial freedom and the growth of the U.S. Bitcoin industry on the global stage.” That seems to be the message, then: One party regulates and thereby oppresses innovation and entrepreneurship, while the other party deregulates and thereby encourages the same.

But it’s not just financial freedom; it’s also freedom of speech. The Left’s sordid history of suppression has always irked us, and it likely turns off technologists, too. Big Tech’s dirty work on behalf of the Democrats reached its zenith in the election-rigging censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. But things began to turn in 2022, when Elon Musk purchased Twitter and thereby established a free-speech beachhead on social media.

Today, even the history-rewriting, Harris-protecting, Trump-hating shills at Axios are sounding the Trump-Tech alarm:

A significant chunk of the tech industry’s money and power is lining up behind former President Trump. … Silicon Valley was once solidly Democratic, with just a handful of Republican outliers. Now its red camp is growing and throwing around its weight. … Venture capital billionaires Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz each will make donations to Trump’s re-election effort [and] are following hot on the heels of Elon Musk’s announcement that he would endorse Trump and form a PAC to aid his campaign.

Not to be lost in all this is the Trump campaign’s other tech proponent. While he’s most noted for his bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance is not only the first Millennial to appear on a major party’s presidential ticket; the retired Marine and Yale Law grad is also the second venture capitalist to do so, Mitt Romney having been the first.

As Bellafiore and Jon Askonas write: “Republican megadonor and Vance mentor Peter Thiel, of PayPal and Palantir, has long been the exception proving the rule of tech’s alignment with liberalism. Not anymore. The nascent ‘tech bros for Trump’ movement demands an explanation.”

That explanation involves the tech industry doing what it should’ve done long ago: protect its own interests as a growing industry. They continue:

The Trump-Vance ticket has shown a far greater openness to new technologies. Trump can tout a track record of cutting regulations. He has promised to “Make America First in AI” by, among other things, creating “industry-led” agencies to oversee AI development. He will speak at a major Bitcoin conference later this month. For his part, Vance hails from the venture capital scene, reported owning six figures’ worth of Bitcoin in his public financial filings, and has taken a strong public stance in favor of open-source AI.

If Donald Trump retakes the White House, it’ll be in large part because he patiently went to work in the past four years growing the Republican base — whether they be blacks or Hispanics or blue-collar workers or safety-conscious suburban moms.

As for Big Tech’s longtime dalliance with the Democrat Party, perhaps they’ve finally been mugged by reality.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/108815-trump-calls-tech-support-2024-07-26

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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UK: Yes. Labour will go Woke

Now that Labour has won an enormous majority the dogs of woke be released. As if on cue, Prime Minister Keir Starmer used his maiden speech to boast about his party’s world-leading share of LGBT MPs and praise race grievance-monger Diane Abbott. He also appointed the woke one-two punch of Bridget Phillipson as Education Secretary and Anneliese Dodds as Equalities Minister.

Both have incurred the ire of J.K. Rowling because they prioritise the rights of biological males who think they are ladies over the right of women to female-only spaces. This foreshadows the surreptitious manner in which, for the the next five years, Labour will push what I call ‘left-liberal extremism’ —walk softly (talk about ‘centrist’, ‘country over party’, ‘bringing people together’) but carry a big woke stick.

As Matt Goodwin has commented, the woke belief system is not just a sideshow. It threatens the very foundations of Western civilisation. Starmer, as Goodwin notes, is likely to toss red meat to Labour’s radical woke interest groups because he lacks the budgetary headroom to drive growth, boost public spending and increase pay.

His large majority also means he will have to contend with querulous progressive backbench MPs who include Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) such as Nadia Whittome - who has vowed to push gender self-identification ‘no ifs ands or buts’, and described open debate as ‘an effective rollback of assumed equality.’

This doesn’t mean Starmer is suddenly going to start saying ‘transwomen are women’ or Britain is ‘systemically racist’. He knows the British people are not woke. In my own surveys, two-thirds oppose woke policies while we have already seen, in Scotland, how a large majority break against woke policies when they become aware of them.

Instead, Keir Starmer’s stated aim is to shoot down the opponents of this cultural revolution as ‘divisive’, thus running interference for woke left activists in the civil service, schools, universities, public sector bodies, galleries and other institutions.

Already, in her opening speech to civil servants, Lisa Nandy, new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has made clear she will drop a ban on rainbow lanyards and other political messaging because ‘the era of culture wars are over’ and ‘[our] entire focus is on the work of delivering change – not lanyards’ (read: green light for culture war activists).

This will be paired with discreet (‘walk softly, big stick’) measures, such as appointing woke ministers to key redoubts in the culture war (such as Dodds and Phillipson), while suggesting that similarly self-identified ‘woke’ activists and supporters of Black Lives Matter take control of Labour’s efforts to curtail illegal immigration.

While the Conservatives did little to combat woke, the differences with Labour are important. The Tories mounted a weak and unfocused effort to rid schools, the civil service, and the NHS of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and gender ideology, failing to stop to these ideas in the wider Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.

While 2019 Tory MPs such as Caroline Noakes, Crispin Blunt, Theresa May and Dehenna Davison were openly woke, many of their peers were not and some, such as Kemi Badenoch, Suella Braverman and Oliver Dowden, were willing to combat this poisonous belief system.

The knowledge that the government was at least somewhat opposed to this agenda meant woke activists in the public sector could not fully let rip. But that leash came off when Labour won its enormous majority at the general election, on July 4.

What is woke? Don’t let the left fool you by arguing it is an empty epithet, that it is just about “being nice” or “tolerant”. In fact, it is an analytically and empirically robust concept —a distinctive political tradition or ideology in its own right.

As I explain in my new online course on Woke, and my new book Taboo, woke refers to the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identity groups.

It is a belief system that results in a prioritising of equal outcomes and protecting minorities from emotional harm. Its supporters claim this is about ‘being kind’ but the reality is that, today, kindness to one group, such as biological males who identify as female, entails being unkind to another, such as biological women who want to protect women’s sport and spaces.

Likewise, assailing ‘whiteness’ in the name of making minorities feel welcome is an attack on the identity of the ethnic majority. Punishing people for politically incorrect speech or chilling their freedom of expression might make a few sensitive minorities feel better, but will embarrass and annoy more confident minorities while stifling the majority group’s traditions and free speech.

These are conflicts of group interest in a democracy, not open-and-shut ‘rights’ issues – which is the way the woke media class and elite institutions frame it.

The view of minorities as sacred began with the anti-racism taboo in mid-1960s America, which was the ‘big bang’ of today’s moral order. Then, over time, the magic was borrowed by feminists, gays, and later trans activists to create new taboos in our society around sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and more.

While proportionate norms against racism and prejudice are important, taboos are tripwires that activate our disgust reflex, reducing complexity in our society to binary and simplistic debates in which those who deviate from the new, stifling orthodoxy are silenced or stigmatised as racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on.

These stigmas are the ‘North Star’ around which today’s moral system revolves. Until we undo that, cancel culture, gender ideology, critical race theory, and routine attacks on the history and collective memory of Western societies like Britain will not just continue; they will accelerate and intensify.

As African-American writer Shelby Steele, who lived through the civil rights struggle, recalls, in the 1950s African Americans in the South had to kowtow to whites, who at that time held the cultural power.

But from the 1960s whites had to genuflect to African Americans, who had acquired cultural power because whites had confessed to having mistreated African Americans. This was an unavoidable response to the dismantling of racial segregation.

In order to recover moral authority, Steele writes that white people and American institutions had to virtue signal they were ‘good whites’ by praising minorities, denigrating their fellow white Americans, or adopting policies like affirmative action, which arguably do more harm than good to African Americans.

We see this, for example, in studies which shown how white liberal progressives in America dumb down their speech when speaking to African Americans, tiptoeing around groups they revere as sacred rather than treating them as equals.

The power of identity stigmas, like kryptonite, can be used to disable opponents, rending them radioactive to others. The political left, whether radical or liberal, drew on newly sacralised minority groups like African-Americans as a source of meaning and direction for their politics.

But this also meant they could borrow cultural power from minorities and use it against the right. In other words, the moral revolution brought about by the race taboo did not just involve a transfer of power from white to black; it also involved a shift of moral authority from right to left.

When a party is in government they make the laws, and when an ideology has cultural power it makes the norms. The new cultural order gave the left the authority to use epithets like racist, sexist or transphobe to shut down democratic debate in numerous policy areas. Immigration, crime, education, health or any other sphere of policy that could plausibly be associated with race or sex thereby came to slant left.

The fear of being irradiated by the kryptonite of the race taboo – and thus socially ostracised – could even turn conservative politicians into useful idiots, such as when Theresa May called the Conservatives the ‘nasty party’ and pushed the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda as a way of deflecting the charge of racism levelled at her government by progressive media because of its efforts to cut immigration.

In this way, as I argue in Taboo, the political left’s strategy across the West has been to launder its illiberal ideas by badging them as liberal. Who could possibly be opposed to ‘anti-racism’, ‘inclusion’, ‘diversity’, or ‘trans rights’, they ask?

Those who try to argue against such policies are smeared as racists, Islamophobes, transphobes, or simply ‘hateful’ figures. We saw this, tragically, with the grooming gangs scandal, where public officials routinely failed to act against Pakistani Muslim gangs that preyed on young, white, working-class girls for fear of being seen as ‘racist’.

In fact, the cultural left deploys a ‘radioactive velvet glove’, involving both a carrot and a stick. The carrot is that you get to think of yourself as a good person if you agree with this new moral order; the stick is you are cancelled if you are dare disagree

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/yes-labour-will-go-woke

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The Tory elite class is in CLOUD CUCKOO LAND

Ever since their historic defeat at the general election, more than a few members of the Tory elite class have decided to leave reality for Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Despite Nigel Farage and Reform having just fired a bazooka at the Conservative Party’s electorate, winning over millions of disillusioned conservatives, one member of the Tory elite class after another has since lined up to warn their party that any association with Faragism would be the final kiss of death.

Writing in The Times, former Conservative Party leader William Hague, who never won an election himself, warns his party against “appeasing populist rhetoric”, “simplistic and nationalistic solutions”, and brands Faragism “a dead end”.

Andy Street, who just lost the West Midlands mayoralty to Labour, likewise warns the Conservative Party it would be “very, very foolish” to adopt a “Reform-light agenda”, which would only push them “down an electoral cul-de-sac”.

And then there’s former leader Theresa May who, after squandering the biggest electoral opportunity in modern times, in 2017, has proclaimed Nigel Farage “is not a Conservative” and should never have any role in the Tory party.

Are these people for real? Are they serious? Do they not realise what just happened to their party?

Or are they simply more interested in signalling their elite values to other members of the Tory elite rather speaking to their wider party and the country?

I say all this because I think they need a reality check. So here it is. Nigel Farage and Reform just completely blew apart the only electoral coalition the Tories have managed to assemble since Thatcher that was capable of delivering a big majority.

And Farage did this —as I warned for years he would— by reaching out to all those disillusioned and disgruntled 2019 Tories who took a punt on the Conservatives five years ago but now wish they never had. Just look at the data.

Farage and Reform, according to Lord Ashcroft’s post-election polling, poached nearly twice as many 2019 Conservative voters as Keir Starmer and Labour. He cannibalised close to one-quarter of the entire Conservative Party electorate.

YouGov’s polling is even more striking. Fully one-quarter of the Conservative Party’s 2019 electorate defected to Reform while just one-tenth switched to Labour.

Put another way, while one in ten 2019 Tories switched to Labour, one in four went to Reform.

The blunt reality is that more 2019 Conservatives switched to Reform than the number who switched to Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined.

Yet if you read recent commentary by the Tory elite class —endorsed by pro-Labour analysts who rather like the idea of the Tories becoming indistinguishable from the Labour Party—then you’d think that the very opposite is true.

You'd think the Tories must do all they can to avoid Faragism and focus instead on winning back all those Labour and Liberal Democrat voters in the big cities and leafy shires who, we are led to believe, might actually consider voting Tory in 2029. Are these people out of their minds?

It is Nigel Farage, nobody else, who presents the greatest threat to the survival of the Conservative Party. And, as we learned last week, he is now also hitting the Tories in other ways, too.

By tearing off the biggest chunk of the Tory vote, Farage just indirectly cost the Conservatives 150 seats while leapfrogging ahead of them to become the main opposition in nearly 100 seats.

He not only displaced the Tories across northern England, which really matters given Labour has re-emerged as the dominant force in Scotland, but has done so while becoming far more competitive in Wales, picking up seven in ten former Brexit Party voters, one in three Tory Leavers, nearly three in ten of all Brexit voters, one-fifth of the working-class, and nearly as many middle-aged men as the Tories.

https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/the-tory-elite-class-is-in-cloud

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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‘Laissez-Faire’ Sweden Had the Lowest COVID Mortality in Europe

Gore Vidal once said “I told you so” are the four most beautiful words in the English language.

Perhaps this is why it’s difficult to resist sharing new data that show how Sweden’s much-maligned pandemic response was right after all.

For those who’ve forgotten, Sweden was excoriated by corporate media and US politicians for its lighter-touch Covid-19 strategy. Many were downright hostile to the Swedes for refusing to shutter schools, lock down businesses, and ramp up police to enforce mandates.

Here’s a sample of headlines:

• “Why the Swedish Model for Fighting COVID-19 Is a Disaster” (Time, October 2020).

• “The Inside Story of How Sweden Botched Its Coronavirus Response” (Foreign Policy, December 2020).

• “Sweden Stayed Open and More People Died of Covid-19, but the Real Reason May Be Something Darker” (Forbes, 2020).

• “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale” (New York Times, July 2020).

• “I Just Came Home to Sweden. I’m Horrified by the Coronavirus Response Here” (Slate, April 2020).

This is just a taste of the reactions against Sweden in 2020. By opting to allow its 10 million citizens to continue living relatively normal lives, Sweden was, in the words of The Guardian, leading not just Swedes but the entire world “to catastrophe.”

Even then-president Trump got in on the action of smacking Sweden around.

“Sweden is paying heavily for its decision not to lockdown,” the tweeter-in-chief warned.

Despite the foreboding rhetoric, the worst-case predictions for Sweden never materialized. In fact, they were not even close.

In March 2021, it was apparent that Sweden had a lower mortality rate than most European nations. The following year, Sweden boasted one of the lowest mortality rates in Europe.

By March 2023, Sweden had the lowest excess death rate in all of Europe, according to some data sets. And though some weren’t ready to admit that Sweden had the lowest excess mortality in all of Europe, even the New York Times, which had mocked Sweden’s pandemic strategy, conceded that the nation’s laissez-faire approach was hardly the disaster many had predicted.

More recently, Danish economist Bjørn Lomborg shared a statistical analysis based on government data from all European countries from January 2020 to August 2022. The study demonstrated that Sweden had the lowest cumulative age-standardized mortality rate in all of Europe in that period.

“Across Europe, Sweden saw [the] lowest total death during and after Covid,” Lomborg said on X (formerly Twitter).

One Economic Fallacy to Rule Them All

Lomborg’s analysis provides yet more evidence that the Covid state was a disaster.

Some will say, How could we have known?

The harsh truth is that some of us did know. In March 2020, I warned that government “cures” for Covid-19 were likely to be worse than the disease itself. The following month, I argued that Sweden’s laissez-faire policy was likely to be a more effective policy than the hardline approach favored by other nations.

I wrote these things not because I’m a prophet, but because I’ve read a bit of history and understand basic economics.

History shows that collective responses during panics tend not to end well, and economist Antony Davies and political scientist James Harrigan explained why near the beginning of the pandemic.

“In times of crisis, people want someone to do something, and don’t want to hear about tradeoffs,” the authors noted. “This is the breeding ground for grand policies driven by the mantra, ‘if it saves just one life.’”

The thing is, tradeoffs are real. Indeed, economics is largely a study of them. When you choose one thing, you give up another; and we evaluate outcomes based on what we get versus what we gave up. We call this opportunity cost.

Throughout most of the pandemic, however, there were those who didn’t want to pay any attention to opportunity costs or the unintended consequences of government lockdowns—and they were legion.

This is the great economic fallacy Henry Hazlitt warned of decades ago.

Hazlitt, the author of Economics in One Lesson, claimed that overlooking the secondary consequences of policies accounted for “nine-tenths” of the economic fallacies in the world.

“[There is] a persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy,” he wrote, “and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be.”

This was the fatal flaw—quite literally—of the Covid state. Its engineers didn’t realize they were not saving lives, but trading lives (to borrow a turn of phrase from Harrigan and Davies).

Lockdowns weren’t scientific and proved ineffective at slowing the spread of Covid, but even if they had worked, they came with severe collateral damage: cancer screenings plummeted, drug use surged, learning was lost, and global poverty exploded. Depression and unemployment skyrocketed, businesses went bankrupt, and high inflation arrived. Babies were denied heart surgery because of travel restrictions, youth suicides increased…the list goes on and on.

The dark truth is that lockdowns were not based on science and came with a rather unfortunate side effect: they killed people.

‘A Giant Experiment’

The secondary consequences of lockdowns and other non-pharmacological interventions (NPIs) did irreparable harm to humans that will be experienced for decades to come.

In the words of New York magazine, lockdowns were “a giant experiment” that failed.

Sweden’s top infectious disease expert, Anders Tegnell, was one of the few people to understand that lockdowns would probably not work. And though Tegnell is not a professional economist, he seemed to understand the lesson of secondary consequences better than many economists.

“The effects of different strategies, lockdowns, and other measures, are much more complex than we understand today,” he told Reuters in 2020, when his strategy was under fire.

By understanding this basic economic principle and having the courage to stand by his convictions, Tegnell was able to avoid the pernicious effects of lockdowns, a policy that seduced so many central planners.

Today, many more people in Sweden are alive because of it. And Anders Tegnell should not be shy in saying, “I told you so.”

https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/03/12/laissez-faire-sweden-mortality/

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Court Strikes Down $3,000 Fine for Person Trying to Leave City During Pandemic

The NSW Supreme Court has found that a $3,000 fine for leaving Greater Sydney without a permit in 2021 was unlawful, casting doubt on the validity of around 30,000 similar fines issued during the pandemic.

This is the second such ruling.

The state’s Revenue NSW, however, says it will not withdraw the fines and, will instead, treat each one on a “case-by-case basis,” likely meaning those fined will need to argue their case with the government and potentially take the matter to court.

The case centred on a $3,000 fine imposed on Angelika Kosciolek for leaving Greater Sydney in 2021. She was homeless and made plans to travel to South Australia after being offered accommodation there.

But Justice Desmond Fagan said fines issued during COVID-19 must pass the “bare minimum test,” established in a 2022 Supreme Court ruling. That ruling said that for a fine to be valid, the penalty notice must clearly state the relevant Act, and the provision related to the offence.

Ms. Kosciolek’s fine was found to have not passed that test, and the Redfern Legal Centre (RLC) said most COVID-19 fines also failed to precisely state which laws had been broken.

‘Withdraw and Repay’: Redfern Legal Centre

“If a COVID fine fails to state the specific offence, the fine is invalid,” Samantha Lee, senior solicitor at the Centre, said. “RLC considers that the judgment supports the conclusion that the remaining COVID fines are invalid and urges Revenue NSW to withdraw and repay the 29,000 remaining fines.”

Yet Commissioner of Fines Administration Scott Johnston, from Revenue NSW, told a Budget Estimates hearing that it would not be withdrawing any of the remaining fines, but will continue to “review and treat every matter on a case-by-case basis.”

However, Ms. Lee urged Mr. Johnston to “come to his senses.”

“The commissioner is refusing to honour a supreme court judgement and do the right thing and give people back their money and withdraw these fines that don’t meet the legal requirements,” she said. “We’re giving the commissioner time to come to his senses and make the right decision to withdraw these fines. If not, then watch this space.”

More than 33,000 COVID fines, worth millions of dollars, were cancelled after a NSW Supreme Court ruling in 2022 found that details of the offences were insufficient.

In that instance, Revenue NSW withdrew 33,121 fines, meaning roughly half of the 62,138 COVID-related infringement notices issued in the state during the pandemic were invalid. However, it emphasised that the decision to withdraw the fines did not mean the offences had not been committed.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/court-rules-a-3000-fine-for-leaving-sydney-during-covid-invalid-5605371

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Veterans Affairs Kept COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate in Place Without Evidence

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) reviewed no data when deciding in 2023 to keep its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in place.

VA Secretary Denis McDonough said on May 1, 2023, that the end of many other federal mandates “will not impact current policies at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

He said the mandate was remaining for VA health care personnel “to ensure the safety of veterans and our colleagues.”

Mr. McDonough did not cite any studies or other data. A VA spokesperson declined to provide any data that was reviewed when deciding not to rescind the mandate. The Epoch Times submitted a Freedom of Information Act for “all documents outlining which data was relied upon when establishing the mandate when deciding to keep the mandate in place.”

The agency searched for such data and did not find any.

“The VA does not even attempt to justify its policies with science, because it can’t,” Leslie Manookian, president and founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, told The Epoch Times.

“The VA just trusts that the process and cost of challenging its unfounded policies is so onerous, most people are dissuaded from even trying,” she added.

The VA’s mandate remains in place to this day.

The VA’s website claims that vaccines “help protect you from getting severe illness” and “offer good protection against most COVID-19 variants,” pointing in part to observational data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimate the vaccines provide poor protection against symptomatic infection and transient shielding against hospitalization.

There have also been increasing concerns among outside scientists about confirmed side effects like heart inflammation—the VA hid a safety signal it detected for the inflammation—and possible side effects such as tinnitus, which shift the benefit-risk calculus.

President Joe Biden imposed a slate of COVID-19 vaccine mandates in 2021. The VA was the first federal agency to implement a mandate.

President Biden rescinded the mandates in May 2023, citing a drop in COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations. His administration maintains the choice to require vaccines was the right one and saved lives.

“Our administration’s vaccination requirements helped ensure the safety of workers in critical workforces including those in the healthcare and education sectors, protecting themselves and the populations they serve, and strengthening their ability to provide services without disruptions to operations,” the White House said.

Some experts said requiring vaccination meant many younger people were forced to get a vaccine despite the risks potentially outweighing the benefits, leaving fewer doses for older adults.

“By mandating the vaccines to younger people and those with natural immunity from having had COVID, older people in the U.S. and other countries did not have access to them, and many people might have died because of that,” Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine on leave from Harvard Medical School, told The Epoch Times previously.

The VA was one of just a handful of agencies to keep its mandate in place following the removal of many federal mandates.

“At this time, the vaccine requirement will remain in effect for VA health care personnel, including VA psychologists, pharmacists, social workers, nursing assistants, physical therapists, respiratory therapists, peer specialists, medical support assistants, engineers, housekeepers, and other clinical, administrative, and infrastructure support employees,” Mr. McDonough wrote to VA employees at the time.

“This also includes VA volunteers and contractors. Effectively, this means that any Veterans Health Administration (VHA) employee, volunteer, or contractor who works in VHA facilities, visits VHA facilities, or provides direct care to those we serve will still be subject to the vaccine requirement at this time,” he said. “We continue to monitor and discuss this requirement, and we will provide more information about the vaccination requirements for VA health care employees soon. As always, we will process requests for vaccination exceptions in accordance with applicable laws, regulations, and policies.”

The version of the shots cleared in the fall of 2022, and available through the fall of 2023, did not have any clinical trial data supporting them.

A new version was approved in the fall of 2023 because there were indications that the shots not only offered temporary protection but also that the level of protection was lower than what was observed during earlier stages of the pandemic.

Ms. Manookian, whose group has challenged several of the federal mandates, said that the mandate “illustrates the dangers of the administrative state and how these federal agencies have become a law unto themselves.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/veterans-affairs-kept-covid-19-vaccine-mandate-in-place-without-evidence-5601173?ea_src=au-frontpage&ea_med=us-news-left-3

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BMI, Inflammation and Cognitive Damage in Long-COVID: Findings from Vortioxetine Trial

A new study suggests that the antidepressant Vortioxetine may improve cognitive function in long COVID patients, especially those with elevated BMI. The findings underscore the interconnected impact of inflammation, metabolism, and obesity on cognitive health in post-COVID syndrome.

Up to 20% of COVID-19 cases may develop post-COVID-19 syndrome (PCC), otherwise known as long-COVID. PCC is characterized by persistent symptoms for at least two months following infection, with cognitive impairment being among the most common. This includes difficulty focusing and memory and is often described as “brain fog.”

Researchers don’t know exactly what causes cognitive impairment in PCC, but it’s suggested that disruptions in inflammation–the body’s natural defense system–may lead to immune cells attacking and damaging neural circuits. Dysfunction in metabolism, energy production, may also play a role. 

With obesity being a major risk factor in long COVID, a recent study sought to characterize the relationship between body mass index (BMI), metabolic disruption, inflammation, and cognitive impairment in long COVID patients. 

The patients were part of a randomized control trial investigating the usefulness of Vortioxetine, an antidepressant, to treat long COVID-related cognitive impairment. The research team was based at the University of Toronto, and led by Professor Roger McIntyre from the University’s Psychiatry and Pharmacology unit. 

Half of the 149 Canadian patients were treated with Vortioxetine and the other half with a placebo over the course of eight weeks. The researchers explained that “vortioxetine has immunomodulatory and antioxidative properties that are relevant to the neurobiology of PCC.” As well as cognitive symptoms, studies show vortioxetine could also help mood and physical symptoms of long COVID, including sleep problems, depression, and anxiety, though it’s not an approved treatment. 

By the end of the treatment, there was an overall improvement in cognitive function but little difference between the groups. However, if vortioxetine-treated participants had high levels of inflammation, metabolic disruption, and elevated BMI, their cognition improved more significantly than the placebo group.

“We hypothesize that individuals with these factors may positively respond to vortioxetine treatment, potentially showing a distinct treatment response profile. Larger studies with predefined variables are required to validate these hypotheses,” the authors wrote. 

The researchers also showed that those with high levels of inflammation and insulin resistance had higher levels of cognitive impairment. Insulin resistance is a defining feature of diabetes and is when cells become less responsive to the effects of insulin, leading to impaired glucose uptake and potential disruptions in metabolic health.

 “Our data are consistent with a compelling body of evidence showing that disruptions in inflammation, metabolic function and obesity hazardously affect brain health, increasing susceptibility to central nervous system and psychiatric disorders,” they wrote. 

However, they noted there were several limitations to their study. For instance, they only used one measure for inflammation,  the production of C-reactive protein (CRP) which increases in the liver as part of an inflammatory response. They wrote, “We only used one variable (e.g., TGHDL) as a proxy measure for metabolism and CRP for inflammation, which is a nonspecific marker that can be elevated for reasons unrelated to disease.”

In line with the findings, several studies show that inflammation and metabolic disruption alter nerve pathways and processes in the brain associated with cognition. For instance, one animal experiment showed that over-inflammation could inhibit neurogenesis in the hippocampus, which is essential for learning and memory. Moreover, insulin resistance and impaired energy production in nerve cells is thought to explain why those with type 2 diabetes often experience cognitive difficulties.

Based on this science, a research team from the University of Glasgow is currently investigating whether a weight loss management program could improve symptoms in long COVID patients. The research team will work closely with overweight people who are experiencing long COVID to adapt and evaluate the weight management program, which can be followed remotely from home. 

“This package of research will provide much needed hope to people with long-term health problems after COVID-19, accelerating development of new ways to diagnose and treat long COVID, as well as how to configure healthcare services to provide the absolute best care,” described Professor Nick Lemoine, Chair of NIHR’s long COVID funding committee and study contributor in a press release.

Going forward, the authors of the current study recommend that further studies should validate their findings on the interrelationship between inflammation, metabolism, BMI, and long COVID. “If confirmed, these results could open promising avenues for therapeutic interventions targeting inflammation and metabolism, aiming to alleviate symptoms and reduce the overall disease burden,” they wrote. 

They also suggested clinicians supporting long COVID patients should be cautious about and monitor the patients’ metabolic functions. 

https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/bmi-inflammation-and-cognitive-damage-in-long-covid-findings-from-vortioxetine-trial-1c470fa0

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH) 

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Excess Deaths Since 2022 Primarily in Vaccinated, Official Data Suggest

Excess deaths since 2022 were primarily in the vaccinated, official data suggest, fuelling fears that the Covid vaccines may be playing a significant role in the high excess deaths in recent years.

Data from the Office for National Statistics show that the proportion of total deaths in England among unvaccinated people dropped sharply in early 2022, even as excess deaths soared. The proportion then remained low throughout the following two years, indicating that the additional deaths during this period were concentrated in the vaccinated.

Is this why the authorities continue to resist releasing the full data on deaths by vaccination status? A cross-party group of 21 MPs and peers are the latest to write to request the data be released. Are the authorities refusing because they know the data show excess deaths predominantly in the vaccinated?

The striking effect was seen in every age group. The charts showing these results can be seen below (find the data here, table 5). The blue lines show the total deaths by month in the age group (left-hand axis) while the red lines show the proportion of deaths in the unvaccinated in the age group (right-hand axis; unvaccinated here means receiving no doses). The most striking feature on each chart is the steep drop in the red line in early 2022, which denotes a sharp and sustained drop in the proportion of deaths in the unvaccinated and a corresponding rise in the proportion in the vaccinated.

Note this is not because more people got vaccinated at that time, as the number getting their first dose in these age groups was almost zero by this point (see chart below, taken from here, data here). People getting their first dose may affect the trends seen in 2021, particularly in the first part of the year, though the over-60s were largely done with first doses by June 2021.

It’s worth pointing out that by using only death data they avoid the problems with the ONS population estimates highlighted by Professor Norman Fenton and others that have tended to exaggerate the death rate in the unvaccinated.

Note that the red lines during 2022 and 2023 are mostly flat, particularly for those in their 60s, 70s and 80s, even during many of the peaks in total deaths. This is particularly noticeable during winter 2022-23, where despite a large peak in deaths the red lines stay largely flat. This suggests that vaccine efficacy against death, at least from the Omicron variants, is very low, since if the virus was disproportionately killing the unvaccinated (i.e., the vaccines were protecting the vaccinated) the proportion of deaths in the unvaccinated should spike during waves. That it usually does not suggests low vaccine efficacy.

These charts include no comparison with death rates before the vaccination period so don’t allow us to say very much about the pre-Omicron period as there is little to compare it to. However, there are notable spikes in the red lines for those over 70 during the Delta wave of late 2021. On first sight this would seem to indicate vaccine efficacy against the Delta variant during that winter. Things may not be so straightforward, however. Notice that the other largish spike for those over 80 is in summer 2022. Importantly, this was not associated with a Covid wave; instead it was associated with a heatwave – that was when the heat dome was sitting over Europe causing record temperatures. This is significant because the vaccine obviously does not protect against heatwaves. This means the reason for the summer 2022 spike is not vaccine efficacy. What is it then?

It seems likely it is related to the ‘healthy vaccinee effect’ i.e., the fact that people who take vaccines tend to be people with better background health outcomes than those who don’t take vaccines. A number of studies indicate that vaccinated people have a background death rate around half that of unvaccinated people (this is a background death rate not related to vaccine efficacy or safety).

The poorer background health of the unvaccinated group means that any general cause of death that disproportionately affects the frail or those with comorbidities, such as a virus epidemic or a heatwave, will naturally, other things being equal, disproportionately affect the unvaccinated group, for reasons unrelated to the vaccine. This would explain the summer 2022 spike in the red lines and it may also explain some or much of the spike during the Delta wave as well. Assuming this is right, it makes the lack of spikes during other waves, such as winter 2022-23, even more striking, as one would normally expect the unvaccinated group to be disproportionately affected by a virus wave or a winter, yet instead the lines remain flat. These flat red lines during waves of deaths are therefore also potentially indicative of a concentration of excess deaths in the vaccinated.

The headline finding from these charts is the striking concentration of excess deaths in the vaccinated after early 2022, just as Omicron appeared. This worrying observation may be why the authorities are keeping the full data, which would confirm or rule out such a finding, firmly under wraps.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/05/excess-deaths-since-2022-primarily-in-vaccinated-official-data-suggest/

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Lockdowns Are a “Failed Experiment”, Welsh First Minister Tells Covid Inquiry

The BBC reports that Wales’s First Minister Mark Drakeford has told the Covid Inquiry that local Covid lockdowns were a “failed experiment”.

He could have said it was a failed policy or intervention, but Drakeford chose to say lockdowns were an “experiment”.

An experiment is a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery and test a hypothesis.

However, at the time, lockdowns were a policy enforced by law.

Mark Drakeford announced in May 2020 that the maximum fine for repeated breaches of the lockdown rules in Wales rose from £120 to £1,920. Up to June 8th, 2,282 Fixed Penalty Notices were issued for – as it seems now – failing to participate in an experiment. People in Wales were twice as likely as English to be fined for breaking lockdown rules. Some experiment.

We are at a loss to explain how the people who set the laws can do so based on experiments. As for experiments, where was the consent procedure, where was the control group and where was the evaluation?

The Welsh Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser for Health, Rob Orford, read from the evidence Drakeford provided to the inquiry that “in hindsight perhaps they weren’t the best idea”.

Yet again, we learned that policy wasn’t based on any evidence. “I’m not sure where the origin of the idea around local interventions came from, whether that was the U.K. Government or Welsh Government.”

We utterly reject the “hindsight” argument, which Sir John Edmunds also used as an excuse for some of his most extreme advice.

We reject it because we pointed out the obvious on April 8th 2020: you cannot affect the circulation of an endemic respiratory virus with any of the interventions known to us, including vaccines, which were not on the table then.

We pointed out that wrecking society and the economy to chase an evidence fallacy was the stuff of nightmares. We and the rest of society have paid a heavy price for this temerity.

Policy must be based on expertise and evidence. If there is no evidence, you either generate it or sit on your hands as the precautionary principle suggests, until such time as the costs and benefits of alternative actions are clear.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/06/lockdowns-are-a-failed-experiment-welsh-first-minister-tells-covid-inquiry/

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Airline Fined $250,000 For Standing Down Worker Concerned With COVID-19

Australian national carrier Qantas has been fined $250,000 after standing down a worker—who was an elected health and safety representative—after he raised concerns about the risk of COVID-19 to staff cleaning aircraft that had arrived from China—an action the judge described as “shameful.”

Lift truck driver Theo Seremetidis was employed by subsidiary Qantas Ground Services (QGS) at Sydney International Airport, and was sidelined in early 2020, before which he had worked for Qantas for nearly seven years as a ground crew fleet member.

Last year, NSW District Court Judge David Russell found the airline engaged in discriminatory conduct, ruling that Mr. Seremetidis was unfairly cut off from other staff who were seeking his help.

“The conduct against Mr Seremetidis was quite shameful,” the judge said. “Even when he was stood down and under investigation, QGS attempted to manufacture additional reasons for its actions.”

Last week Qantas agreed to pay Mr. Seremetidis $21,000 for economic and non-economic loss.

On March 6, Judge Russell ordered that QGS be convicted and fined $250,000, finding that the company’s conduct involved significant culpability and was deliberate, rather than inadvertent and that QGS had “deliberately ignored” the consultation and other provisions of the Work Health and Safety Act. He said there was a “gross power imbalance” between Mr. Seremetidis and senior managers at QGS.

Mr. Seremetidis was “most conscientious” in carrying out his role as a health and safety representative, the judge found, staying up-to-date with official announcements about the pandemic and even doing research on his day off.

Judge Russell found QGS saw Mr. Seremetidis’s directions to cease unsafe work as a “threat” to the conduct of the business, in particular to its ability to clean and service aircraft and get them back in the air, and pointed out that the role of health and safety representatives was “vital” to the protection of workers and the running of any business.

During the hearing last year, Qantas said it had taken the action because Mr. Seremetidis had been “creating anxiety amongst the workforce.”

It was revealed the airline had told concerned workers that the risk of them contracting COVID-19 from their work was “negligible,” and they could not “be reasonably concerned about contracting the virus.”

Prosecutor Matthew Moir said Qantas gave priority to its commercial interests over the health and safety of its workers. But Qantas lawyer Bruce Hodgkinson argued the airline had been doing its best to deal with the fast-unfolding pandemic.

Qantas Apologises

A Qantas spokesperson said the airline accepted the penalties. “We agreed to compensation for Theo Seremetidis and the court has today made orders for that compensation to be paid,” the spokesperson said.

“We acknowledged in court the impact that this incident had on Mr. Seremetidis and apologised to him. Safety has always been our number one priority and we continue to encourage our employees to report all safety-related matters.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/qantas-fined-250000-for-standing-down-worker-concerned-with-covid-19-post-5601460

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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